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Sunday, 26 June 2016

Proven Ways to Earn Your Employees’ Trust(赢得你的雇员信任的行之有效的方法）

Trust is often talked about as the bedrock of a company’s success.
Most people think about the issue in terms of customers: They have to
believe in you and your products and services. But trust within the
organization is just as important: Your employees must believe in each
other. When they don’t, communication, teamwork and performance
inevitably suffer. After New York Times publisher Arthur
Sulzberger fired the newspaper’s editor, Jill Abramson, in May, he
explained that he’d repeatedly warned her that she was losing the trust of the newsroom. But how do you build trust in the workplace?What the Experts SayTrust is an “evolving thing
that ebbs and flows,” says David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at
Northeastern University and the author of The Truth About Trust.
And yet it’s essential to boosting employee engagement, motivation,
and candor. Employees are more likely to follow through on goals set by a
manager they trust and to be more forthcoming about the challenges they
see on their level. “Managers will never learn the truth about a
company unless they have employees’ trust,” explains Jim Dougherty, a
senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and veteran software
CEO. That’s why it’s so critical for managers to constantly reinforce
their trustworthiness. Here’s how.Make a connectionOne of the most effective trust-building strategies is to create a personal connection.
That’s especially true for managers. “As a person’s power increases,
their perceived trustworthiness goes down,” says DeSteno; they seem less
reliant on others and therefore less trustworthy. Counteract this view
by getting to know the people on your team,
and letting them get to know you. This might involve chatting about how
you share a hometown or like the same sports team. It could also
include hosting regular brown-bag lunches or occasionally taking a few
calls with the customer service team. “Do something that makes them
believe that you are one of them,” says Dougherty. That signals that
“even though you are the boss, in the end you’re all in this together.”Be transparent and truthfulShare as much as you
can about the current health and future goals of the company.
Otherwise, you’ll find yourself constantly battling the rumor mill. “If
there is a void of information, employees will fill it and they will
always fill it with negative information,” says Dougherty. There may be
some data that you cannot share, like compensation, but regularly
distributing other information — like financial results,
performance metrics, and notes from board meetings — shows that you
trust your employees, which in turn helps them have greater faith in
you. Part of being transparent also involves having the integrity to
tell the truth, even if it means you have to be the bearer of bad news.
“If you can’t tell people the hard stuff, they won’t trust you,” says
DeSteno.Encourage rather than commandEmployees know the
difference between being given orders and being offered encouragement.
“You don’t succeed in the long run by telling people what to do,” says
Dougherty. “You have to motivate them to do it.” When employees feel
empowered to succeed and believe that the goals of the company are
aligned with their own, they’ll work harder and smarter. For managers,
that means delegating tasks and granting as much autonomy as possible,
while also making it clear what your expectations are and how
performance will be measured. “People will trust you if you trust them,”
says Dougherty.Take blame, but give creditNo one wants a boss who hogs all the glory, but dishes out harsh criticism when times get tough. “The
best way to get people to behave well is to give credit,” says
Dougherty. That reinforces the sense that people are working toward
shared goals rather than simply for a boss’s personal agenda. Instead of
casting blame for layoffs or poor profits, stress that it is the
company — and your own leadership — that need to improve. This signals
that you “don’t believe different rules apply to you than apply to
others in the organization,” says DeSteno.Don’t play favoritesIf there is a surefire way to lose trust, it’s by playing favorites in the office. “Any
time there is favoritism, people will see it,” says Dougherty. “If you
treat some people better than others, you totally blow it.” If you
always give certain employees information or assignments first, or if
you only ever ask a few out to lunch or to the ballgame, everything else
you do to build trust will be undermined. You also want to avoid
badmouthing at all costs, because it sends the signal that your public
and private personas diverge. “People need to know that they are dealing
with the true you,” says DeSteno. If they catch you criticizing a
colleague behind his or her back, “they’ll assume that, as soon as they
leave the room, you aren’t treating them well either.”Show competenceIf you aren’t good at your job, you can forget about earning employees’ trust. “Even if everyone likes you, you have to be competent
to be trusted,” says DeSteno. That means regularly updating your own
skills and following through on commitments. You should also avoid
trying to be an expert in all things; those in the know will spot faked
knowledge immediately. If you have the humility to ask questions and
express an eagerness to learn, you’ll work smarter — and so will your
employees. After all, “we can accomplish a lot more working with other
people and relying on their expertise than we could alone,” says
DeSteno.Principles to RememberDo:

Emphasize what you have in common — it helps employees believe that their goals are aligned with yours

Share whatever information you can — when people feel trusted, they’ll trust you back

Admit mistakes and accept responsibility

Don’t:

Give orders — motivating employees to succeed on their own will earn you trust

Badmouth anyone — people will automatically assume you’ll also speak poorly of them when their backs are turned

Fake knowledge — employees need to see you are competent enough to admit what you don’t know

Case Study #1: Keep the door openWhen Jane
McIntyre became CEO of the United Way of the Central Carolinas in 2009,
she stepped into a scandal. The nonprofit organization was reeling from
accusations of gross mismanagement, and Jane’s predecessor had left
abruptly amid a controversy over her generous salary and retirement
package. The community was outraged, donations were in a tailspin, and
employees were confused and angry. Then the economic crisis hit, which
necessitated layoffs and budget cuts. “It was a mess,” Jane says.
On her first day, Jane knew she had to do something meaningful to
show the beleaguered staff that she was worthy of their trust. As the
staff assembled to welcome her, someone asked her what her first
priority was going to be. “There was this glass door that had been
installed between the lobby and the executive offices,” McIntyre says.
“The door was always shut. So I said, you see that door? It’s never
going to close. And the staff burst into applause.”
Though Jane had to make difficult cuts in the months to come, she
made sure that every decision was delivered with candor and honesty. She
created compulsory all-staff meetings because she felt she “had to
communicate face to face” with employees, especially when it came to
delivering difficult news. She streamlined departments to create more
connections among employees. And she reinstated the ability to send
all-staff emails, a feature that had been disabled under her
predecessor, to better share information across the entire company.
She also showed she was not above making cuts at the top. She made it
known that her own salary was less than half of her predecessor’s. The
board of directors, which had been accused of rubber-stamping excessive
executive benefits, was cut from 67 members to 24. And she made
accessibility her hallmark. “It helps so much if people know they have
access to you,” she says. “It slows you down a bit, but it helps so
much.”
Today, the organization is exceeding its fundraising goals and
increasing grants to local charitable agencies. But Jane sees the
progress she’s made in earning employees’ trust most clearly in the
tenor of the all-staff meetings. “When I started, it was like you were
in a graveyard,” she says. “There were no questions, no expressions. Now
people laugh, they cut up, they have fun. There is camaraderie.”Case Study #2: Meet bad news head onSeveral
years ago, Mike Volpe’s team was growing so rapidly, he could barely
keep everyone’s names straight. In the span of nine months, the chief
marketing officer for software company Hubspot saw his group grow from
20 to nearly 50 people. “I remember looking out at our team meeting and
seeing so many new faces,” he says “It was a challenging time.”
In order to earn the trust of so many new people at once, Mike
adopted a few key strategies. He reinforced the company’s policy of
radical transparency, sharing data, goals, missteps, and milestones with
everyone, at every level. “There’s no reason to keep a lot of things
away from employees,” he says. “If you do, you are saying you don’t
trust them.” He also gave his marketing team a high level of autonomy.
“When you manage 15 or 20 people, you can be that person who approves
things before they go out,” he says. “But once we started to grow
quickly, I became a giant bottleneck. I knew I needed to trust the team
to get things out. And we found the employees do a better job when you
give them that authority and responsibility.”
He also regularly collected anonymous feedback via a tool called TinyPulse,
which surveys employees on how they are feeling about their jobs. It
was in those surveys that, several months ago, Mike started to see signs
of a dip in trust. It was just after “three or four people who weren’t a
good fit anymore” were let go around the same time, he says. “It wasn’t
on purpose. It was just how the timing worked out.” But he could see
from the anonymous surveys that people were now afraid for their jobs.
He immediately addressed the issue, both through the anonymous
response feature on TinyPulse and in public “Ask Mike Anything”
meetings. “I laid things on the table and took hard questions and didn’t
give them sugarcoated answers,” he says. “I tried to take it head on
and explained why it wasn’t indicative of a larger trend.” That honesty
“really went a long way.” In surveys since, happiness metrics have fully
recovered and even gone higher than they were in the period before the
layoffs.
“I feel really good about how we navigated those waters,” he says.
“It could have spiraled out of control, but because we had a system to
track people’s happiness and a process to have honest conversations, we
hit a pothole instead of falling into a crater."

from https://hbr.org/2014/06/proven-ways-to-earn-your-employees-trust/